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Metastatic Breast Cancer Questions about advanced metastatic breast cancer. |
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| 7/26/2006 | Dear Lillie, thank you so much for your advices and on-line support. it must be a very tough work receiving every day e-mails full of pain, fear and anxiety and responding.... So i have a maybe unusual question to do. My mother had a big swelling in her arm on August 2005. The scans showed enlarged axillary and supraclavicular lymphnodes, the tumor markers was CEA 380 ans CA27-29 at 125. I was searching the previous tests and i was scared and shocked when i found that 9 months before, in November 2004, she did the routine annualy blood tests and CEA was already at 65 and CA27-29 at 10, but no one told her nothing. When i asked her she answered that the doc told her that everyhting is OK and she read 6.5 instead of 65. I know that metastatic disease is incurable but if she started treatment 9 months before, based on TM, is it possible that treatment could be more effective, disease under control and possibly live some months or years longer? Thank you | ||
| Replied | JHU's Breast Center Reply | ||
| 7/26/2006 | hinesight is always 20/20 unfortunately and we can't go backward.. so we don't know. sounds like she has a local disease problem so needs to get underway with further evaluation (CAT scans and bone scan) for staging work up and get treatment started. sometimes whe lymph nodes are blocking flow this severely they remove them. other times they radiate them. | ||
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